Biblical Types Of Our Lady

• 9 years ago

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY

A previous article looked at the role of Mary as the New Eve, and now we will look at some biblical types of our Lady, and see how the early Church fathers saw different types and prophecies concerning Mary in the Old Testament, that is, that particular incidents or artifacts pointed toward our Lady.

This follows from the principle that many of the incidents in the Gospel accounts of Jesus have an Old Testament type to which they correspond. An example of this is the typological identification made between Abraham’s son Isaac, who carried the wood for his own sacrificial fire on his back, and Christ, who carried the wooden cross on His back to Calvary (Gen. 22:1-19; John 19:17).

These types of Mary can be divided into several groups, including persons such as the biblical woman Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who through a miraculous pregnancy gave birth to Isaac (Gen. 21). Similarly, the well-known prophecy of Isaiah, which describes the coming of the virgin with child (Isaiah 7:14), has also been associated with Mary, while objects such as the Ark of the Covenant or Gideon’s fleece also drew comment from the early writers. It is these latter types which we will explore in this article.

Some of the Church fathers equated Mary with the ladder seen in a dream by Jacob (Gen. 28:10-17). This was because they saw her as a Mediatrix between Earth and Heaven, one who, although fully human, was intimately linked with God. St. John Damascene made this comparison as follows: “That man [Jacob] contemplated heaven joined to earth by the two ends of a ladder and saw angels going up and down upon it. . . . So you have assumed the role of a mediatrix, having become the ladder by which God comes down to us, . . . Thus [O Mary] you have reunited what had been divided.”

A sixth-century sermon, attributed to the writer St. Anastasius of Antioch, sees Mary as “the ladder stretched towards heaven, the gate of paradise, the entry into incorruption, the union and harmony of men with God,” while St. Theodore of Studion (c. 759 to 826), made a similar comparison, and the Akathist hymn also explores this idea.

Gideon’s fleece (Judges 6:36-40) was another object in the Bible used as a type of Mary. Gideon wanted to be sure God was with him and so put a fleece of wool on the ground, telling God that if in the morning the fleece alone was wet with dew, and the ground dry, he was sure of divine support. When he arose he found it just as he had requested, but he was still hesitant and so asked for another sign, this time to have the ground wet, but the fleece dry. God listened to him and Gideon was thus encouraged to do battle with the Midianites who were oppressing Israel.

For some of the early writers, the wet fleece in contrast with the dry floor symbolized the way that Mary was filled with grace, while the rest of mankind was affected by sin, and thus “dry”; likewise in the fleece being dry and the ground wet, they saw a symbol of the way Mary alone was preserved from the sin that affected every other human being.

For St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330 to c. 395), the burning bush (Exodus 3:1) prefigured Mary’s virginity: “It seems to me that already the great Moses had known of this mystery by means of that illumination in which God appeared to him, when he saw the bush burning without being consumed….That is what in fact was prefigured in the burning bush;…the mystery in the Virgin was fully manifested. As on the mountain the burning bush was not consumed, so the Virgin brought forth a child and did so without stain.”

The Ark of the Covenant was a particularly rich Marian type for the Fathers. This was the wooden box, overlaid with gold both inside and out, which housed the stone tablets of the law which Moses brought down from the mountain (Exodus 25:16; Deut. 10:1-5). This was originally kept in a tabernacle or tent, before the Temple was built.

St. Athanasius made this comparison between Mary and the Ark: “Truly, O noble Virgin, you are great above all greatness; who indeed can compare with your greatness; O dwelling place of the Word of God? With whom shall I compare you among all creatures? You are evidently greater than all of them. O Ark of the covenant surrounded totally and purely on all sides with gold! You are the Ark containing all gold, the receptacle of the true manna, that is human nature wherein the divinity resides.”

We can find a similar approach in the Akathist hymn, which describes Mary as the “ark gilded by the Holy Ghost,” while St. John Damascene described Mary’s burial thus: “The assembly of the apostles carried you, the Lord God’s true Ark, as once the priests carried the symbolic ark, on their shoulders.”

Another type of Mary which was very popular with the Fathers and the early Christian writers was the identification of her with the eastern gate of the New Temple, as seen by the prophet Ezekiel. In the biblical text this gate was always to be kept shut after the passage through it of the Lord (Ezek. 44:1-2), and the Fathers saw this as symbolic of Mary’s continuing and perpetual virginity after the birth of Christ.

St. Jerome speaks about this as follows: “She is the East Gate, spoken of by the prophet Ezekiel, always shut and always shining, and either concealing or revealing the Holy of Holies; and through her ‘the Sun of Righteousness,’ our ‘High Priest after the order of Melchizedek,’ goes in and out….A mother before she was wedded, she remained a virgin after bearing her son.”

All of this was summed up by Vatican II in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church:

“The sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments, as well as venerable tradition, show the role of the Mother of the Savior in the plan of salvation in an ever clearer light and call our attention to it. The books of the Old Testament describe the history of salvation, by which the coming of Christ into the world was slowly prepared. The earliest documents, as they are read in the Church are understood in the light of a further and full revelation, bring the figure of a woman, Mother of the Redeemer, into a gradually clearer light. Considered in this light, she is already prophetically foreshadowed in the promise of victory over the serpent which was given to our first parents after their fall into sin (cf. Gen. 3:15). Likewise she is the virgin who shall conceive and bear a son, whose name shall be called Emmanuel (cf. Isaiah 7:14; Micah 5:2-3; Matt. 1:22-23).”

All of this shows how incredibly rich the biblical types of Mary are as a source of deepening our understanding of how greatly venerated our Lady was by the best minds of early Christianity, and also must surely prompt us to practice a similar veneration towards her ourselves.

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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also a written a time-travel/adventure book for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/.)